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king’s tomb, resting in that
king’s sarcophagus, with both the cartonnage replacement
coffin containing him and his outer shroud labeled with that
king’s prenomen? Harris and Wente could offer no
explanation for this apparently extreme misidentification of
some other Thutmosid king for Amenhotep II; but they were
convinced that No. 61069 was not the second Amenhotep. What did seem likely
to them was that, of all possible Royal Mummies candidates,
only he could have been the father (craniofacially speak- ing)
of the peculiar remains labeled-but-questioned as those of
Amenhotep III. But was No. 61069 really Thutmose IV? More
importantly, was No. 61074 actually Amenhotep III?
Skipping ahead chronologically, Harris and Wente turned to
Tutankhamen as the only one of the Royal Mummies who was found
in a totally undisturbed context within his own tomb. The sole
problem with the occupant of KV62 is that his paren-tage is
debated. It is agreed by Egyptologists generally that he was
the son of a king — based on a single textual inscription
which describes him as such. But which king? Of all of the
extant remains of Thutmosid males, the one nearly identical
craniofacially to Tutankhamen is the unnamed individual whose
(now) skeletal remains were found in problematic Tomb 55 in the
Valley of the Kings, the so-called “Amarna Cache.”
Al- though even the sex of this person was confused initially,
it is agreed by most scholars today that the skeleton in
question represents the mortal remains of ephemeral King
Smenkhkare, the short-lived coregent and successor of Akhenaten
— although a minor- ity view continues to hold out
for an identification with Akhenaten himself. Therefore, it
seemed clear to Harris and Wente, based solely on their very
alike craniofacial mor- phologies, that Tutankhamen and the
KV55 individual were closely related, either as brothers or as
father and son (with Tutankhamen in the latter position,
clearly).
So,
which of the Thutmosid male mummies between Thutmose III and
Smenkhkare/Tutankhamen is most like the latter craniofacially?
Harris concluded that this was No. 61073, “Thutmose
IV.” Historically, the fourth Thutmose would have been
either the grandfather or great-grandfather of Tutankhamen,
depending on which candi- date is favored as the latter’s
father (the two most often touted being Amenhotep III and
Akhenaten, with majority opinion in the Heretic’s camp).
But what, Harris and Wente pondered, if “Thutmose
IV,” No. 61073, was, in fact, Amenhotep III, and
therefore ar- guably the father of both Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen (which would
account for the similarities in craniofacial morphologies of
all three)?
Harris
and Wente were convinced that the mummy labeled
“Amenhotep III,” No. 61074, was not that king.
Certainly, the analysis of his craniofacial morphology proved
that he was wholly unlikely to have been the father or even the
grandfather of either Tutankhamen or Smenkhkare. Study of the
No. 61074 remains subsequent to An
X-Ray Atlas has convinced Harris
(and apparently Wente) that the skull of that individ- ual —
too large for the body by two standard deviations — has
craniofacial features consistent with sculpted portraits of
Akhenaten. Should No. 61074, in fact, be the her- etic
pharaoh’s remains, it would help explain two factors
regarding their condition when discovered in 1898: the terribly
battered state which they are in (having suffered more violence
at the hands of tomb robbers than any of the Royal Mummies
except Rameses VI); and the embalmers’ insertion of
resinous material under the skin of the limbs and neck to give
them a more life-like appearance, a practice otherwise unknown
in the New Kingdom and not seen again until the Twenty-first
Dynasty. But Akhenaten was historically, and inarguably, the
son of Amenhotep III; and the only one of the Thutmosid mummies
which Harris and Wente saw as possibly the father of No. 61074
is the individual found in the sarcophagus of Amenhotep II, and
clearly thought by the ancient necropolis priests to be that
king. Thus, was “Amenhotep II” actually Amenho- tep
III? If so, which of the Royal Mummies is Amenhotep
II’s?
For reasons they did not make clear, Harris and Wente
also offered another can- didate for No. 61074: King Ay,
Tutankhamen’s immediate successor, who was not re- lated
by blood to the Thutmosid line. By taking “Amenhotep
III” completely out of the sequence of pre-Tutankhamen
rulers, the orthodontist and Egyptologist were able to move
“Thutmose IV” sequentially closer to Tutankhamen
and Smenkhkare, casting No. 61073 (“Thutmose IV”)
as actually Amenhotep III. But where does that leave No. 61069,
the putative “Amenhotep II”?
Because
their Royal Mummies musical chairs was quite clearly
complicated — and in some ways internally contradictive —
Harris and Wente came up with three se- parate
“schemes” to reorder the identifications of the
Eighteenth Dynasty kings. In all of these the mummy of the
founder of the dynasty, Ahmose I, is unknown; and the mummy
labeled “Amenhotep I” remains Amenhotep I. In Scheme 1,
“Thutmose II” is Thutmose I; “Seti II”
is Thutmose II; “Thutmose III” is Thutmose III;
Amenhotep II is unknown; “Amenhotep II” is Thutmose
IV; “Thutmose IV” is Amenhotep III; Akhen- aten is
the KV55 individual; Smenkhkare is unknown; Tutankhamen is
Tutankhamen; and “Amenhotep III” is Ay.
Scheme 2 has
“Thutmose II” as Thutmose I; “Seti II”
as Thutmose II; “Thut-mose III” as Thutmose III;
Amenhotep II unknown; “Amenhotep II” as Thutmose
IV; Akhenaten unknown; Smenkhkare as the KV55 individual;
Tutankhamen as Tutankh-amen; and “Amenhotep III” as
Ay.
In
Harris’s and Wente’s Scheme
3, “Thutmose II” becomes
Thutmose I; “Seti II” becomes Thutmose II;
Thutmose III is possibly unknown; “Thutmose
III” becomes possibly Amenhotep II; “Thutmose
IV” remains Thutmose IV; “Amenhotep II” be-
becomes Amenhotep III; “Amenhotep III” becomes
Akhenaten; Smenkhkare is the in- dividual in KV55; Tutankhamen
is Tutankhamen; and Ay is unknown. To help explain the problem
that Tutankhamen and Smenkhkare would not seem to be the
biologic sons of either the reassigned “Amenhotep
II” or “Amenhotep III,” Harris and Wente pro-
posed that Tutankhamen, at least, was the product of a marriage
between a son of Thutmose IV and a daughter of Amenhotep III,
the assertion that he was a king’s “bod- ily
son” notwithstanding. This rather startling concept would
go to explain Tuthankh- amen’s claim in a text that
Thutmose IV was his “father’s father.” Wente
pointed out that even in the Old Kingdom the title
“king’s son of his body” was used to refer,
oc- casionally, to a king’s grandson.
Certainly, by their implied admission, there is nothing
conclusive in James Harris’s and Edward Wente’s
well-meaning attempt(s) to scientifically sort out the apparent
misidentifications made in the Twenty-first Dynasty of several
of the Royal Mummies. Indeed, some of their suggested
reassignments of identity seem implausible, especially their
wish to see both Nos. 61071 (“Amenhotep II”) and
61073 (“Thutmose IV”) as possibly Amenhotep III,
when neither set of remains bears any resemblance to the third
Amenhotep as represented in the scores of representations of
him which have survived from antiquity. Elliot Smith described
“Thutmose IV” as an extremely emac- iated
individual at the time of his death, whereas several extant art
works strongly sug- gest that the historical Amenhotep III was
somewhat corpulent in his last years. Addi- tionally, there is
in the Luxor Museum a small limestone ostracon with
raised-relief sketch portraits of two kings, one to a side.
Albeit uninscribed, these are generally thought to represent a
young Amenhotep III (at the time of his accession?) and Thut-
mose IV at the end of his reign. The latter image is of a
rather gaunt individual and bears an uncanny resemblance to the
“Thutmose IV” mummy in profile, suggesting that the
plump-cheeked fourth Thutmose (as he was represented in the
famous pair-statue with his mother from the outset of his
reign) may have suffered some sort of wasting debilitation
towards the end of his life, caused by a disease that
ultimately killed him.
While
it is very likely that the necropolis priests who rescued and
rewrapped the New Kingdom royalty (and others) mistook one
individual for another — as the latter were shuffled from
hiding place to hiding place — it seems almost incredible
that the desecrated mummy of Amenhotep II was removed from his
tomb to be rewrapped (in a workshop at the Medinet Habu
Mortuary Temple of Rameses III?) and, in the process, another
king’s mummy was inadvertently mistaken as his,
mislabeled on shroud and replacement coffin, and returned to
KV35 and Amenhotep II’s sarcophagus. While they are but
minor works of art, the sculpted faces of two figures depicting
Amenhotep II found in the funerary refuse of KV35 (a
bitumenized wood-wooden ka figure [CG 24598] and a calcite
group-statue of the king being lustrated by two deities [CG
24157] both bear a rather strong resemblance to the mummy
“Amenhotep II,” in profile and full face. Something
so simple as the apparent correspondences of
“portraits” of Thut- mose IV and Amenhotep II to
the mummies thought (by the ancient necropolis priests) to be
theirs should give pause to any rush to judgment about the
latter’s identities as suggested by apparent
discrepancies in their craniofacial morphologies.
How did it happen that the seeming
misidentifications occurred in the
first place? When the rulers of the Twenty-first Dynasty made
the decision to dismantle the plundered interments in the Great
Place (Valley of the Kings), the accomplishment of this did not
happen overnight, but evidently over several years. When the
royal tombs were entered by those assigned to recover the human
remains therein and to collect whatever was salvageable or
recyclable (bullion-wise) from the vandalized funerary
furnishings that remained, they were confronted by much the
same scenes as Victor Loret found in KV35 when he first entered
it in 1898: total chaos. Certainly the mummified royal
occupant(s) in each tomb had been rapaciously denuded of their
trappings and often were found with a limb or two detached, the
body cavity broken open, even the head severed in some
instances. Anything that might have borne the name(s) of the
tomb owner had been stripped from the body and carried off,
leaving the mummy(ies) in question essentially anonymous, save
for the context of the sepulcher itself.
It appears that the probably never-used
tomb of Rameses XI (the latter having been interred in the
Delta in all likelihood) served as a makeshift workshop wherein
paper-thin gilding was stripped with some effort from furniture
parts and coffin fragments, etc. The recovered human remains
were carried up out of the Valley of the Kings and across the
flood plain to the Mortuary Temple of Rameses III, where
necropolis priests set about reassembling (as necessary) each
body, rewrapping it — often without great care,
frequently incorporating some of the original bandaging —
and inscribing in inked hieratics on the outer shroud the nomen
and/or prenomen of the presumed ruler before them. The
reconstituted mummy bundle was then placed in a coffin at hand
(these for the most part salvaged from various plundered
burials, not necessarily royal and — with a couple of
exceptions — not original to the individual being
enclosed within). The replacement coffin then was itself
inscribed in ink with its new occupant’s name(s), and
very probably put in storage at the temple, its reinterment to
be dealt with at some later time — when it was
moved, eventually, to either the family cache of Priest-King
Pinudjem I or to the Tomb of Amenhotep II (or some other
yet-to-be-found place) where, hopefully, it would be safe for
all time to come.
Further resolution of the actual
identities of the several disputed Royal Mummies awaits two
future developments: (1) refinement of DNA testing, whereby
accurate results can be gotten from mummified tissues (samples
of same for the Royal Mummies being presently in sterile
storage in Cairo); and (2) discovery of the Third Royal Mummies
Cache, which likely will be found to house many — if not
all — of the still-missing New Kingdom rulers: Ahmose I
(?), Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III (?), Akhenaten (?), Horemheb,
Ay, Rameses I, Seti II, Tausret (?), Setnakht, Rameses
VII-VIII-X-(?)XI and Herihor; plus any number of royal wives,
princes and princesses of the period, including Neferure,
Mutemwiya, Nefertiti, Meritaten, Ankhesenamen, Nefertari,
Isetnofert, etc.; and unaccounted for Pinudjem family members,
particularly the high-priests Piankh, Menkheperre and
Nesbanebdjed (Smendes) II.
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